


Filling in the Spaces

by Celandine



Category: Sense and Sensibility (1995), Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
Genre: Ficlet, Gen, Growing Up
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-28
Updated: 2011-12-28
Packaged: 2017-10-28 08:34:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 250
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/305941
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Celandine/pseuds/Celandine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Margaret longed to fill in the blank spaces in the atlas for herself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Filling in the Spaces

**Author's Note:**

  * For [iulia_linnea](https://archiveofourown.org/users/iulia_linnea/gifts).



> For iulia_linnea who wanted Captain Margaret, "her adventurous life".

Her father had taught her to use the atlas when Margaret was still quite small. Patiently he explained what all the different symbols meant, helped her pronounce the strange names, and left her to let her imagination run wild as she pored over its pages, all in the name of geography lessons.

After his death, Margaret lost herself in the pages of the atlas even more often. She would sit reading under the library table, pretending that the heavy oak above her head was instead the canvas of a tent pitched somewhere in central Asia, and that the maids passing in the hall outside were slant-eyed merchants come to sell their silks and spices and precious jewels.

Margaret loved her half-brother John because her mother told her she must, but she disliked his wife heartily, if not vocally. She expected to dislike Fanny's brother as well, but Edward was quite different from his sister. He seemed to understand, even sympathize with, Margaret's longing to explore, not to follow the path expected of her, but to fill in some of the blank spaces in her atlas for herself.

A wholly unlooked-for legacy from a distant and elderly cousin when she was twenty enabled Margaret to escape the tedious life to which she was already beginning to resign herself. Her return trips to England occurred at increasingly greater intervals, but she never omitted to visit her sisters' families, and her nieces and nephews listened with awe to stories of her adventurous life.


End file.
